


deadheaded

by sunbrights



Category: Super Dangan Ronpa 2
Genre: F/M, Family Dynamics, Hanahaki Disease
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-03
Updated: 2018-02-03
Packaged: 2019-03-13 05:46:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,894
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13564113
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sunbrights/pseuds/sunbrights
Summary: No one can know. Not the clan, not his classmates. Not Natsumi, and especially not his old man. It invites too much scrutiny, and also it’s just fucking embarrassing. The heir of the Kuzuryuu Clan is so soft he can’t even breathe without choking.





	deadheaded

His mom figures it out before he does. Something about how he held himself the first few months after he turned thirteen, always hunching and clearing his throat. He starts to cough while he and Natsumi are watching the dojo class have their sparring matches, and she steps in. She makes an excuse, and steers him away.

(He’s always had breathing problems. He loses to Natsumi every time she wants to race, and he’s a terrible swimmer, never able to keep his head down. But that year, thirteen— it isn’t the same.)

She takes him back to his room and sits him down on his bed. She tells him to cough, so he does, and she rubs his back like she used to when he was a little kid with a cold. He wants to complain about it, but then they come up, filling his windpipe, and he nearly chokes on them again.

She taps him on the back with her fist, three firm beats, and they spill out into his palms: broad, flat petals, golden-yellow, flecked with blood. She takes them from him before he has a chance to even process that he’s holding them. She doesn’t throw them away; she crushes them between her hands and burns them in his hearth. He watches them wilt and crumple to ash and feels like he might throw up.

“It’s fine,” she says. “No one will see. No one will know.”

“What the fuck,” he wheezes. He can’t breathe. There’s more, he can feel them fluttering. “What the _fuck._ ” 

She kneels in front of him. She takes his face in both hands, gentle, the gentlest he’s ever seen her. It’s the first time she’s let him curse without saying anything about it. “You’re a boy,” she assures him, thumb at his temple. “It will clear up on its own.”

Until then, she shows him how to breathe. She lays one hand against the middle of his back, to straighten his spine, and lifts his chin with the other, to open his airway. “Breathe through your nose,” she instructs, so he does.

It’s the first full, uninterrupted breath he’s had in weeks. He gets too excited and tries to suck it down; it agitates the petals left behind, and he coughs those up too, right on the floor. She scoops them up without a word.

“Slow,” she tells him. “Breathe evenly, through your nose.” She presses on his back and realigns his posture. “You need to learn, Fuyuhiko. Today.”

He practices. He learns.

*

When she says, “No one will know,” what she means is, “No one _can_ know.” Not the clan, not his classmates. Not Natsumi, and especially not his old man. It invites too much scrutiny, and also it’s just fucking embarrassing. The heir of the Kuzuryuu Clan is so soft he can’t even breathe without choking.

(Peko’s name doesn't get mentioned. It never does, for anything, because Peko never counts. He counts her, though. She can’t know. She’ll never know. He’ll die before she even gets a glimpse of a single damn petal.)

*

The doctor says that for a hormonal flare-up like his, it’ll take two or three months to fully clear his system.

It doesn’t.

*

The first time he throws up, Peko is the only one there. He's finishing getting ready for school; he coaxes her into telling him about the stray cat that hangs around the dojo, and when she mentions how its tail reminds her of a feather duster, fat and fluttery, he starts to cough.

She stops talking and waits politely for it to pass, except that it doesn’t. He can’t stop. He has to keep swallowing to keep the petals down, and that agitates his throat more, which makes him cough more, which forces him to swallow more. He clamps both hands over his mouth to keep it in.

Her eyes narrow. Her hand flutters over his upper back. “Young master, are you alright?”

There’s a point of no return, and he’s crossed it. They’re gonna come up. They’re gonna come up whether he likes it or not, his whole heart spit right into her hands. He staggers to his feet, bolts for the bathroom, and her concern spikes into alarm.

“Young master!”

He slams the door behind him, and it’s in her face, maybe, but she can’t see this, she can’t, she _can’t._ He hits his knees in front of the toilet, and it all comes up. _All_ of it: the petals and his breakfast and burning, sour acid.

He stares at it, a disgusting mess of his insides. His breath wheezes in his chest. “Fuck.” 

Her footsteps approach the door. He wipes his mouth on the back of his hand and fumbles to flush, but the evidence is everywhere. There are bright petals scattered all around his knees, stuck to the tile with his blood. 

There’s not enough time. “Go away!” he shouts, hunching his back over the bowl. “I don’t fucking want you here!”

She stops.

“... Should I find someone else?” she asks, after too long a moment. He’s hurt her feelings. That’s good, if it keeps her on the other side of the door.

He balances his forehead on the edge of the toilet bowl. His nose is starting to run. “Just get lost, Peko.”

“You shouldn’t be alone, young master,” she answers, and it’s so soft, so concerned, so—

He coughs until the petals fill the back of his throat, and then he throws up again, only this time there’s nothing else in his stomach to come up. It’s just blood and bile and whole yellow flowers, spinning on the water.

*

By the time he’s fifteen, the tendrils have coiled through his lungs. It hurts when he breathes too deeply, so he has to keep them shallow; he can’t climb the trees in the garden anymore or spend as much practice time in the dojo.

It also means he runs out of breath faster when he talks for too long.

He’s been giving this briefing for twenty minutes. In the last five, he’s started to lose listeners, mainly juniors who’ve grown out of their newbie nerves but haven’t figured out yet that they don’t have enough power to be drunk on it. They whisper and yawn and poke at their phones.

He grits his teeth, and breathes until it feels like his chest is slicing itself open. He smacks the phone out of the hands of the guy closest to him. “Put that shit away,” he snaps, and his voice projects. All the wandering eyes in the room draw back toward him. “I’m fucking talking here.”

The guy looks startled. He ducks his chin. “Sorry, sir.”

He breathes in again. It’s like he’s one of those knife boxes from a magic trick, and it’s his lungs trapped inside. He does it three or four more times. He’s sure he must be bleeding by the end of the briefing, so when he has the chance he locks himself in his room and coughs until they all come up.

The petals aren’t as pretty when they’re smeared with blood instead of speckled.

*

Natsumi ups her game over winter break, his first year of high school. He’s not sure if it’s because she’s learned how much she can get away with, or because she hates that she can’t get a rise out of him as easily as she used to. Either way, she graduates from bumping his shoulder in the hall to spitting taunts at him around corners to stealing his stuff and sprinting away. She takes whatever she can find: his snacks and his books and his wallet.

He gets sick of it.

She plucks his phone straight off his desk, once, while he’s in the middle of studying. She doesn’t even run; she just skips out of the room with it dangling between her fingers. She thinks he won’t chase her. She thinks he can’t.

He nearly knocks the chair over shoving it back from the desk. “Fuck off, Natsumi!”

“Or what?” she shouts. “You’re gonna slow-mo walk at me?” He lunges, and she shrieks with laughter when she takes off down the hall. He shouldn’t chase her, but he does anyway: through the kitchens, out the side door, and up a half-staircase at the back of the house. 

There’s only six steps. It’s never been a problem before. He takes them two at a time, though, and when he gets to the top, his chest is rattling. Colors go dark and muddy. His vision is like a flip book with half the pages cut out; he sees Natsumi turn back toward him, then he sees the sky, and then the dirt.

When everything snaps back into place, he’s on the ground at the bottom of the stairs, his head is fucking killing, and Natsumi is bent over him, too close to his face.

“Fuck,” he groans, “get _off._ ”

He swats at her until she leans back enough for him to sit up. She’s on her knees, face ashen, mouth gaping. “What the fuck was that?!” she blurts, shrill. “I thought you were fucking dead!”

“I’m _fine,_ fuck.” He must have knocked his head on the way down. He touches his fingers to the spot; it’s sore but not bloody. “Calm down.”

“ _Fine?_ ” She shoves him in the chest, indignant, he thinks— until the petals spill from her fingers and flutter into his lap. “You call this _fine?_ ”

And that’s it. The jig is up.

Her eyes are shiny. “You weren’t breathing, dumbass. I had to clear your stupid airway.” She scrubs at them with the heels of her hands. “You’re _welcome,_ by the way.”

He gathers the petals up, and crushes them between his hands. They’re delicate. It doesn’t take much to turn them into an unrecognizable little ball, and after that they all fit in his pocket. He can get rid of them later.

“It’s Peko, isn’t it?” Natsumi demands. She at least has the damn decency to lower her voice.

He rubs at his face. “Natsumi—”

“I can’t believe this. You let it get this far? Are you blind or are you just that much of a fucking moron? If I have to tell her for you, I—”

He grabs her by the shoulders. “Natsumi, shut _up._ ” She glares back at him. “If you say one fucking word to her, I swear I will kill you _myself,_ understand?”

“Fuck you! So you’re just gonna roll over and die because you’re scared?!”

“I’m not fucking scared!”

“Then you’re stupid! She’ll say yes, idiot!”

“Of course she’ll say yes!” he shouts. There’s no satisfying reverberation out here. It just gets swallowed by the trees, and leaves his chest empty. “What else is she gonna—” he has to breathe, “fucking—” he needs to breathe, “ _say?!_ ” 

He drops both hands to his knees and gasps. He can see Natsumi wringing hers in her lap. 

“That’s—” Cold air makes it worse, like instead of one knife twisting in his chest it’s seven little ones. He keeps going anyway. “That’s the— _goddamn problem._ Alright? So— So you- you can’t—”

“I get it,” she snaps. “I get it, okay? Save the melodramatic speech for somebody who cares.” She sniffs, and exhales noisily. “If you pass out again I’m gonna leave your sorry ass here.”

She slaps his phone into his palm and hauls him to his feet.

*

Natsumi tells everyone it was rainwater that made him slip. She plays it up, acts it out, keels over laughing about it, so everyone believes her.

Almost everyone.

His mom calls him into her room after dinner. She locks the door behind him, and they both sit, him on the edge of the bed and her at her vanity. She pulls the pins from her hair, and it spills to her elbows like a sandy blonde sheet, streaked with gray. She turns her back to him and brushes it out, stroke by stroke.

“You’ll have the surgery,” she tells him, her eyes steady on her reflection.

His heart drops through the floor. “What?” 

She doesn’t repeat herself. She only meets his eye through the mirror. 

He swallows. It shakes up the petals in his throat, and when he says, “No,” it’s too much of a sputter. She raises her eyebrows. “No way.”

“Don’t be stubborn. It’s the only solution.”

“What the fuck are you talking about? It’s not a solution at all!”

She doesn’t slam her brush down, but it does hit the vanity hard enough that it hurts his ears. “Watch your language,” she snaps. “You will _not_ speak to me like that.”

He bites back the answer that jumps to his tongue.

She twists the top off of a jar, some kind of serum she wears to sleep. The seal pops loudly in the silence. “This is not a discussion,” she says. “You’ve indulged this fantasy long enough. So have I.” She spreads it on her palms and smooths it through her hair, scalp to tip. “I'll schedule time for you to see the doctor next week.”

An appointment next week means it’ll be gone by the end of the month. It’s a straightforward surgery, even for advanced cases like his, and the waiting list can be long, but waiting doesn’t apply to them. He’ll go to sleep, wake up, and it’ll be gone. All of it, the good and the bad.

He thinks about Peko and the cat with the feather duster tail.

“You never asked me who it was,” he says. “This whole time, you never asked.”

She doesn’t answer right away. She takes her time wiping her hands on the small towel she keeps on her vanity, and keeps staring at her reflection.

He expects her to lie. Some bullshit line about respecting his privacy, or not wanting to meddle in his personal life, or whatever. Instead, she turns her face away from the mirror and says, “I always suspected this might happen.”

“... What?”

She shakes her head. “The way you looked at her, even when you were a little boy...” She sounds far away— but then she scoffs, one hand over her mouth. “I said from the beginning we should keep you separated. Your father disagreed. He was wrong, obviously.”

He can hear his heart in his ears. His throat feels thick. It hurts, not the way it usually does.

She looks at him, finally. “She will never love you,” she says. Not like it’s an insult, like it’s a fact. Like she’s letting him down gently. “She’s incapable of it.”

He thinks about Peko at the door of his bathroom, staying with him after he plainly told her to leave. The coughing fit starts before he can head it off, and he clamps his elbow over his mouth to muffle it.

“She’s not— _incapable_ of anything,“ he manages, breath stuttering. “You think we screwed her up just the way you wanted? You think she’s— some machine, sitting around, waiting for you to pour commands into?” He has to gasp again. She closes her eyes. “You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”

“And supposing that’s true,” she answers without flinching, “do you think you could ever be with her?”

His breath comes in sharp. It sucks the petals against the top of his windpipe, and he chokes.

“You will lead this family one day,” she tells him. He’s still coughing, but she doesn’t let up. “It will be your duty to guide them and protect them. There will be a time when there’s much more at stake than whatever flights of fancy your heart comes up with. You will have your role. She will have hers.” 

She stops there. She sits tall, spine straight and chin high, and waits for his fit to pass. “So I’ll ask you again,” she says, when he’s only hiccuping, “do you think you could ever be with her?”

He’s pictured it before. Things are different, when he’s in charge. The walls his parents built up all come down. Peko learns to step out of the shadows behind him and into the light beside him. She’s not a role, or a duty, or a tool. She’s herself. She finally sees the breaks in the path ahead of her, instead of them all being obscured by the back of his head.

And then what? 

He lets her go, and he’s supposed to hope that she chooses to fall straight back into his arms?

“It will hurt now,” his mom says, softer, when he doesn’t answer. “But it’s the only solution.”

Maybe it is. If the question is _Why suffer over her if you’ll never have her?_ , then it’s the only solution. It picks him up and puts him back on the neat, tidy track his parents laid out for him. It would make his life easier, in every single fucking way. He’d wake up, breathe in deep, and be exactly what he’s supposed to be.

He breathes in shallow, and thinks about Peko.

“I’m not doing it,” he tells her. 

“Fuyuhiko—”

He breathes in again, the wrong way this time, big and scratchy and agitating. “You want it gone?” Forcing it isn’t hard; he’s always waiting to cough, every second of every day. The petals come up, smooth and coppery on his tongue, and he spits them out on the floor. “You’ll have to cut it out of me yourself.”

They’re dark with blood. They almost look more red than yellow, in the dim glow of the bedside lamp. She refuses to look at them; she turns her face away sharply, jaw set and eyes narrow. She glares at the door for a long, long time.

Then, she sighs. “I see,” she says, and plucks her phone from the sash of her kimono.

He watches her thumb out a message. It’s not relief creeping down his spine. “What—” His throat is raw. “What’re you doing?”

She doesn’t look up. “Since you insist on being stubborn,” she says, like she’s telling him what’s for dinner, “I’m having the girl dismissed.”

“ _What?_ ” He doesn’t have enough air in his chest to shout with; it comes out more gasping than indignant. “You can’t do that!” He’s on his feet. He can grab the phone, he’s close enough. “Where the hell else is she supposed to go?!”

She seizes him by the wrist. It’s with her off-hand, and she can still twist his arm away like he’s made out of paper. It’s where Natsumi gets her iron grip from.

“You listen to me,” she says. Her eyes are sharp and her voice is low. “We are the reason that girl is still alive. Every breath she takes is something I _allow._ I have tolerated much, much more from her than she has ever been entitled to, but here, now, is where I draw that line.” Her thumb presses against the inside of his wrist, over his pulse. She breathes in, and it trembles. “I will _not_ allow her to kill my son.”

It’s her shoulders next, then her chin. He’s never seen her tremble like that, violently, like there’s something shaking her to pieces. She pushes him away, and her hands are trembling, too, when she twists back to face the vanity. Through the mirror, she reminds him of Natsumi, with her face white and her eyes shining.

“Wasting away on misguided love is not romantic,” she says. “It is not noble. It’s _foolish._ ” She sets her phone on the vanity with a _snap,_ next to the gleaming ivory handle of her hairbrush. “These are your options. Be a man and make your choice.” 

“High school,” he blurts.

She meets his eye in the glass.

“Hope's Peak. Let us get through high school. If she graduates, she’ll have options. She—” The cough scratches its way out. She glares at the top right-hand corner of her mirror. “She’ll have _something._ She’s got nothing right now. If you throw her out, she’ll be on the street.”

“No one will stop her from attending school,” she says. “The academy provides full room and board. It doesn’t even ask tuition.”

“If you do this, she won’t go. I’m telling you, she won’t.”

She purses her lips. “And you?” she asks. 

He swallows. His throat itches and spasms.

She presses, edged with sarcasm, “Does she also need you to love her in order to attend her classes?”

It’s the first time anyone’s ever said it out loud. The thing every single fucking flower has been trying to shout from the base of his throat for almost three straight years: he loves her. He’s literally sick to death for loving her.

“Let me get through high school,” he rasps. He does his best to hold his ground. “I’m—” he breathes until it hurts, “I’m asking for this— one fucking thing.”

She turns around to face him. “How many times,” she says slowly, “am I going to need to ask you to mind your language when you speak to me?”

“One thing,” he manages. “It’s _one thing._ ”

She stands up from the vanity. She sets her hand against his cheek, and he can feel how the tips of her fingers are still shaking. “You’re asking me for two years,” she says. “That is not _one thing._ ”

It’s not her answer. She’s not always easy to read when she’s upset, not like his old man is, but right now there’s grim indecision in every wrinkle of her face. She’s thinking about it.

“Two things,” he croaks.

She sighs. “Stand up straight,” she instructs, and he does. She lifts his chin, and he breathes in, slow, through his nose. It stings at the edges, a little, but it doesn’t catch on anything on the way down.

“High school,” she agrees, and his exhale is a sputtering cough. “On the condition that when it's done, you'll have the surgery.”

He clenches his jaw, but she doesn't let him hedge. She stares at him, expectant, until he gives in. “Fine.”

“If there’s another incident like today, even one, I won’t ask your permission.” She steps around him, and kneels to pick the petals up off the floor, one by one. “Otherwise, we’ll revisit this when you graduate.”

“Mom—”

She crushes them between her hands. “This conversation is over,” she says. “Go to bed, Fuyuhiko.”

*

He dreams about breathing. It’s the same dream every time: he’s somewhere clear and crisp, a sprawling field or a snowy mountainside. Peko isn’t there, but she is somewhere, and he knows that wherever it is, it’s safe and it’s far. He breathes. Cold air fills his lungs, and it doesn’t hurt.

It’s only a dream. When he wakes up, he still has to cough his windpipe clear. The pain is still there, squeezing in from every direction when his chest expands too far.

He straightens his spine. He lifts his chin, and breathes what air he can.

Peko meets him outside his room, before breakfast. Soft morning sunlight diffuses through the shōji; it shines in the ridges of her braids and lifts warm color in her cheeks. 

“Good morning, young master,” she says. “Did you sleep well?”

Beneath the petals, beneath the pain, there’s a rising, tingling sensation in his chest, like carbonation. It bubbles to the surface and bursts at the top, ticklish and sparkling. 

He clears his throat.


End file.
